Mexico's Drug Fight Lagging, With Graft Given as a Cause

By TIM GOLDEN,

Published: August 7, 1994

Correction Appended

GUADALAJARA, Mexico, Aug. 3—
More than a year after the Government vowed to redouble its fight against illegal drugs following the killing of a Roman Catholic Cardinal here by suspected traffickers, American officials and some of their Mexican counterparts say that those efforts have faltered and that the trade is thriving as much as ever.

While Mexican drug-control agencies still trumpet occasional blows to the mafias that smuggle most of Colombia's cocaine into the United States, the violence of the traffickers and their corruption of the authorities have burst back into view, forcing the issue into the campaign for the presidential election on Aug. 21.

Like President Carlos Salinas de Gortari before him, the presidential candidate of the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, has called the drug trade the most serious national security threat Mexico faces. But neither he nor any of the other leading candidates has offered much by way of solutions to the problem, adding to the questions that American officials ask privately about Mexico's resolve.

"Particularly over the course of 1994, we have seen a dramatic deterioration," a senior United States official said of Mexico's drug-control efforts. "They have really done a very poor job of going after and capturing major traffickers, who have continued to operate with tremendous impunity." Nuncio Meets Hunted Men

That impunity was made shockingly clear in late July when it was confirmed that the country's two most-wanted men, cocaine-trafficking brothers who are sought in the murder here of Juan Jesus Cardinal Posadas Ocampo, had both pleaded their innocence in separate meetings with the Papal Nuncio at his residence in Mexico City. The disclosure brought angry criticism of the Vatican envoy, Jeronimo Prigione, by politicians and clerics. It also raised new doubts about the effectiveness of the Government's pursuit of leading traffickers.

American officials attribute part of the problem to a shift in Government attention to other security concerns since the peasant rebellion in southern Mexico this year. They criticize the replacement of key counternarcotics officials by others they consider less capable or honest, and a seeming reluctance to confront the traffickers as the Government's power wanes in its last year and political tensions rise with the impending elections.

Yet according to some of those officials and a former aide to the Mexican Attorney General who abandoned the drug fight in frustration this year, the overriding impediment to capturing major traffickers is drug-related corruption at all levels of the Mexican state.

"The problem is their political penetration not only of the Attorney General's office, but of the rest of the federal Government and state governments and local governments," said the former official, Eduardo Valle Espinosa. "That problem is obviously also in certain parts of the armed forces."

In a letter to President Salinas that he made public on July 31, Mr. Valle told of being blocked by other law-enforcement officials, of raids not undertaken, of important traffickers being allowed to go free. He also raised questions about Mr. Salinas's Secretary of Communications and Transportation, Emilio Gamboa Patron. Critical to the Drug War

Mr. Gamboa, 43, one of the more powerful and conservative young officials in the Cabinet, holds a portfolio critical to the drug war because it includes the administration of airports, seaports, highways, communication links and the federal highway police.

But Government intelligence intercepts cited by Mr. Valle indicate that Mr. Gamboa and one of his aides also met late last year with a 31-year-old woman who some federal investigators believe is a representative of one of Mexico's most powerful drug traffickers, Juan Garcia Abrego.

Senior Government officials confirmed the intercepts, which allude to a Nov. 8 meeting between Mr. Gamboa and the woman, and to her contact with at least one federal police commander. At the same time, the officials denied that the information showed any wrongdoing by Mr. Gamboa, whose secretary said the woman had dropped by his office to show him a painting she was selling.

"She is being investigated just as 100 other people are being investigated," Mario Ruiz Massieu, the Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Government's antinarcotics efforts, said of the woman. "Is the Secretary of Communications and Transportation responsible for knowing who all of the representatives of Garcia Abrego might be?"

As for the broader complaint that drug traffickers are buying protection at all levels of the Government, Mr. Ruiz Massieu argued that Mr. Valle -- a former student leader and leftist politician who makes his living as a journalist -- was hardly an unbiased source.

"He proves absolutely nothing of what he says," Mr. Ruiz Massieu said. "I would never have named him as an investigator. He has no experience." 'Honest and Brave'

By contrast, the Mexican interior minister, Jorge Carpizo MacGregor, has continued to speak highly of Mr. Valle, whom Mr. MacGregor initially hired as an adviser after becoming Attorney General early in 1993. Even after Mr. Valle resigned on May 1, complaining that Mexico had become a "narcodemocracy," Mr. Carpizo described him as "an honest and brave man."